"RAW CONSUMER" review ( Article-8 )

INTRODUCTION

Recently I enrolled for a Mini-degree in "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" from CXL Institute. I would love to share whatever I will learn from this Mini-degree through a series of articles.

This is my 8th "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" review article in a series of a total of 12 articles. I will be posting an article on each weekend for consecutive 4 upcoming weeks in which I will cover all the tactics and principles of Digital psychology, Consumer Behavior, and Persuasion and Neuro-Marketing which will surely help anyone passionate about marketing.

CONSUMER'S MEMORIES

Each consumer has a large storehouse of consumer-related memories that can influence how products and services are evaluated. For example, if you ate at a particular restaurant and found a hair or an insect in your food, then this particular memory of this experience will prevent you from eating at the same restaurant again. Positive experiences would have the opposite effect. When selecting a restaurant, you might recall a previous visit in which the food was fabulous or the service incredible—memories that would clearly influence your decision about eating there again. We also have memories of how much we paid for something, and this memory can affect our future choices; we will not buy something we think we paid too much for the last time. Promoting empathy and relatable memories can play a role in creating identification with characters or situations in ads. For example, if a Garbage management ad can make consumers think about incidents in which their own garbage bags remain open and unmanaged, consumers may be better able to relate to an ad showing inferior bags splitting apart while Specialised garbage keeping bags remain strong.

TARGETED AUDIENCE

There may even be more than one target audience, so it’s important to distinguish each consumer segment and understand as much as possible about them. It’s important to paint a clear picture of our consumers and to actually give them names and faces. We need to understand them more like real people, instead of just as a collection of facts. It will make building the experience effect much more real. A great business is generated from real people, not just a collection of data. Now, of course, the Internet is an incredible resource. We can all find websites not only from other brands in the category but also from advocacy groups and related organizations that are full of consumers talking and sharing their lives, their struggles, and their experiences with their favorite or not-so-favorite brands. They are debating and connecting with each other to build common bonds. It’s an amazing learning opportunity for a brand manager. Go onto the blogs and into the comments sections and listen to what people are saying. They may even be talking about your brand! They are certainly talking about things that are important to them, and that will help with your marketing. There are organizations you can hire to scan the world of blogs, or you can do it yourself. You’ll be shocked at some of the topics that consumers are willing to talk about. 

GET IN TOUCH WITH RAW CONSUMER

Spend a day with a consumer, at least one from each of the target audiences. Live with them for a day. See what they go through. Actually witness a mom’s routine as she gets up, drops the kids off at school, commutes to work, makes dinner, tries to relax, and then goes to bed. Watch how she consumes media like television, magazines, direct mail, e-mail, and websites. Log on with her for an hour and see how she spends her time online. Walk-in her shoes for a day and observe her as a real person. It will open your eyes. It’s incredibly enlightening to see how other people live and to see what they go through, particularly when we are trying to market to them, and especially when we are trying to build a relationship with them. 

DEVELOP A CONSUMER PROFILE

As we put all this learning together, we can start to paint a picture of the consumer we are targeting and develop an actual consumer profile. We’ll use this profile a lot when we will market to them and pitch the project. A consumer profile will become an invaluable tool in developing all the brand experiences we want in the marketplace. I’d like to illustrate the concept of a consumer profile by writing out an example of how this knowledge can all start to come together. Let’s create a consumer profile for a potential new furniture brand, a totally new line of furniture we will exclusively sell through our own stores, in catalogs, and on our own website. We’ll assume that we’ve done all our homework—we’ve done the consumer learning that we’ve been talking about. We’ve done some qualitative and quantitative testing, read a few of the popular home improvement books, gone through a bunch of informative websites, joined some Facebook and Telegram groups and gone furniture shopping with some consumers who are in the market—some first-time buyers and some others who are more like experienced people. We have scoured our competitors’ websites and visited a few of their stores. We’ve even spent some time with a few retail sales representatives to observe that side of the business. It is absolutely central to making sure that the experience for consumers truly connects with them. While it is a relatively simple concept, it is perhaps one of the easiest things to forget and one of the hardest things to put into place.

EMOTIONAL SIDE

Many marketers get so caught up in getting things done that they often forget a very important part of the consumer connection. They forget the emotional side of marketing. Truly understanding our consumers is critical to building experience for them. The experience must connect with consumers, it must get them interested, and it certainly must engage them if we are going to have a successful, sustainable brand. We’ve briefly talked about how our product and its pitch must engage consumers both rationally and emotionally.

As a conclusion, we must not underestimate the powers of human behavior and marketing psychology in order to get success as a good marketer and to grow our business exponentially.

Congrats! You are now one step ahead in the competition after understanding Marketing Psychology and Consumer behavior.

Stay tuned for the next Article!

 (This article is a review for the mini degree, "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" from CXL institute".)

Thanks :-)

Gaurav Panwar